Though late, council makes right decision not to hide names from public

Austin City Council members interviews city manager candidates during a closed-door executive session at the Hilton Austin Airport on Tuesday Oct. 31, 2017. Jim Twombly of Ex Tulsa city manager walks out of an interview at Hilton Austin Airport.(RICARDO B. BRAZZIELL / AMERICAN-STATESMAN)

Austin City Council members finally have come to their senses regarding their secret search for a new city manager. Better late than never, as the saying goes.

Reversing course on Thursday, council members now say they will release up to five finalists’ names as early as Friday or next week.

Too bad Mayor Steve Adler and the council woke up only after a wave of public criticism, stakeouts by reporters outside their closed meetings and hide and seek games with candidates. Regrettably, their reversal comes after the American-Statesman filed a lawsuit, stating the city had violated Texas open government laws.

A change of heart, while welcome, won’t erase the poor judgment the council showed in voting unanimously to go along with a misguided recommendation from a private firm hired to find candidates to replace Marc Ott, who left the post a year ago to take a job in Washington, D.C.

The council in March made that decision, voting to keep all candidate names secret until a single finalist was picked.

Incredibly, the firm, Russell Reynolds, persuaded Adler and the other 10 council members that the city would attract a bigger and better pool of applicants for reasons only the naïve would believe: Top applicants might not apply for the job that pays more than $300,000 a year if they knew their current employers might find out they are looking elsewhere.

Right.

By now employers, be they governmental entities or private companies, understand the rules of the game when it comes to hiring top managers, school superintendents, CEOs, police chiefs and administrators. You look for that talent in other people’s backyards.

Typically, those people are working in public or private sector jobs elsewhere when they are approached by recruiters. That practice is called headhunting. And let’s get real. Why would Austin or another entity want a manager who isn’t thought well enough of to be headhunted?

We know that from our own experience. Before securing the job of police chief for Houston’s police department, Art Acevedo turned up in searches by the cities of Dallas and San Antonio to fill top cop posts there. That was during his tenure as Austin police chief.

The city knew it had a good police chief and was aware of others trying to woo him away. As we’ve witnessed in the city’s current search for city manager, secrecy is elusive.

The Statesman’s Elizabeth Findell and Philip Jankowski have identified five of the eight candidates the council interviewed over two days last week: Miami City Manager Daniel Alfonso; Minneapolis City Administrator Spencer Cronk, Ann Arbor City Administrator Howard Lazarus; Chattanooga Chief Operating Officer Maura Black Sullivan and former Tulsa City Manager Jim Twombly.

With tactics such as shielding candidates faces as they walked past reporters or moving applicant interviews to an undisclosed location at Austin-Bergstrom International airport – racing away in vans to a room blocked from the public by airport security to escape reporters – the process turned into an embarrassing episode for the council.

As these things were unfolding, I was copied on an email from Austin attorney Bill Aleshire, a former Travis County Judge and passionate advocate of open government. His words stuck with me: “It is not adherence to the letter of open government laws that achieves transparency. Real transparency results only when government officials hold a deep and sincere respect for the people’s right to know what occurs in the people’s government.

“For public servants, that means that, even if your attorney tells you that you can technically do something sneaky, you just don’t do it because it betrays a commitment to real transparency.”

I hope council members will remember and live by those words. Instead of meeting behind closed doors for business that should be done in public, they should throw open the doors. Wide.

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